Mental Health Awareness Month: Challenges Facing Rural Caregivers – KMALAND
May is Mental Health Awareness Month.
Rural Minds and the National Grange Society held a webinar discussing the challenges facing caregivers in rural America. Those challenges often get overlooked. Brittnee Henry is a communications and marketing professional who returned to her home in Iowa to care for her father. She made that decision when it became clear her father couldn’t live on his own anymore.
“I chose to move home and be his advocate. Even though he's in a care facility, people must have an advocate and someone that can be there on a day-to-day basis at the drop of a hat if need be. Because of the nature of the disease with frontal temporal dementia, there's a lot of agitation, there's fear, and it was necessary for me to move home. So, it's been a lot of tipping your life upside down, but I realized it's really important to take care of yourself first when you're a caregiver.”
She says full-time caregivers need support themselves because they often forget to care for themselves.